S Voice and Google Now

Samsung released S Voice as an answer to Siri before Google came out with its own solution in Google Now. S Voice is the culmination of Samsung's ongoing effort at integrating voice commands into the Android experience, an effort which goes back to the days of Vlingo. You may remember the voice activation (saying "Hi Galaxy" to trigger S Voice).

S Voice can do the usual - search the web, make calls, send texts (which Android natively supports and so does Vlingo), but you can also use it instead of the notification area toggles, start the camera and take a photo, control the music player and stop or snooze alarms all with voice commands.

S Voice has plenty of options

It's also a tool for quickly looking up facts - it's powered by Wolfram Alpha (which handles some of Siri's answers too). It has an enormous database covering topics ranging from Culture and Media to Physics. S Voice can also be used as a calculator.

Samsung has decided to keep S Voice alongside Google's solution as the two do differ in functionality. Jelly Bean has the unspoken Google Now info cards, but it also brought Google's Knowledge Graph, which can answer factual questions.

Google Voice Actions can handle stuff like sending messages (SMS or email), asking for directions, taking a note or opening a site. Since the latest update, Google Now can also launch apps, check and manage your calendar and look up nearby places of interest and stuff like movie openings in theaters.

Google Now is also on board

One big advantage of Google's Jelly Bean is that the voice typing functionality doesn't require an internet connection to work. You can enter text by speaking anywhere you can use the on-screen keyboard - be it the Messaging app or a note taking app - without the need for a data connection as long as you have pre-downloaded the needed language packs (and those only take about 20-25MB of your storage per pack).

Making voice typing available offline also made it faster as it's not dependent on your connection. What's even more impressive is that the transition hasn't cost it anything in terms of accuracy.

Synthetic benchmarks

This feels odd - talking about benchmark performance on a camera. But the Samsung Galaxy Camera is the fastest camera we've ever benchmarked. Sure, it's the first one we've benchmarked, but on several occasions it outperforms the Samsung Galaxy S III.

That should come as no surprise - there's a Galaxy S III inside the Camera. The same Exynos 4412 chipset anyway - with a quad-core Cortex-A9 processor at 1.5GHz, 1GB of RAM and Mali-400 GPU.

Our CPU benchmarks show that the Samsung Galaxy Camera is very close to the Galaxy S III in terms of raw CPU power, just slightly behind. Compound benchmarks like AnTuTu and Quadrant, however, rate it higher.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

HTC One X+280

LG Optimus G285

Samsung Galaxy Note II305

HTC One X (Tegra 3)330

LG Optimus 4X HD350

Samsung Galaxy S III359

Meizu MX 4-core362

Samsung Galaxy Camera381

Nexus 4431

Linpack

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy Note II214.3

Nexus 4213.5

Meizu MX 4-core189.1

HTC One X+177.7

Samsung Galaxy S III175.5

Samsung Galaxy Camera165

HTC One X160.9

LG Optimus 4X HD141.5

Geekbench 2

Higher is better

Nexus 42100

Samsung Galaxy Note II2000

Samsung Galaxy S III1845

Samsung Galaxy Camera1727

LG Optimus G1723

HTC One X (Tegra 3)1634

Apple iPhone 51601

AnTuTu

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy Camera15758

Nexus 415146

Samsung Galaxy Note II13562

HTC One X+13519

Samsung Galaxy S III12288

Meizu MX 4-core11820

HTC One X (Tegra 3)11633

LG Optimus G11226

Quadrant

Higher is better

HTC One X+7632

LG Optimus G7439

HTC One X5952

Samsung Galaxy Note II5916

Samsung Galaxy Camera5710

Samsung Galaxy S III5450

Meizu MX 4-core5170

LG Optimus 4X HD4814

Nexus 44567

The Galaxy Camera can play games too - while the GLBenchmark 2.1 (720p off-screen) results are pretty good, the GLBenchmark 2.5 (1080p off-screen) score is better than a Tegra 3 chipset can offer. You shouldn't have any problems idling the time away between shoots. If you've got backup for the not too impressive 1,650mAh battery.

GLBenchmark 2.1 Egypt (720p offscreen)

Higher is better

LG Optimus G113

Samsung Galaxy Note II105

Samsung Galaxy S III99

Meizu MX 4-core80

Nexus 478

HTC One X (Tegra 3)64

LG Optimus 4X HD61

Samsung Galaxy Camera56

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

LG Optimus G29

Apple iPhone 527

Nexus 426

Samsung Galaxy Note II17

Samsung Galaxy S III15

Samsung Galaxy Camera15

HTC One X+12

HTC One X9

Some web browsing is very much an option too - that 3G or LTE connection is good for more than just beaming a picture of your lunch to Instagram. The Samsung Galaxy Camera actually outran the Google Nexus 4 in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and beat the Galaxy S III in the BrowserMark 2 HTML5 test. It even edged out the S III and the Nexus 4 in Vellamo.

SunSpider

Lower is better

Samsung Ativ S891

Apple iPhone 5915

Nokia Lumia 920910

Samsung Galaxy Note II972

HTC One X+1001

Motorola RAZR i XT8901059

Samsung Galaxy Camera1134

Samsung Galaxy S III1192

Meizu MX 4-core1312

LG Optimus G1353

Nexus 41971

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

LG Optimus G2555

Nexus 41794

Nokia Lumia 9201774

Nokia Lumia 8201760

Samsung Omnia W1632

Samsung Galaxy Camera1582

Samsung Galaxy S III1247

Vellamo

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy Note II2418

HTC One X (Tegra 3)2078

Samsung Galaxy Camera1697

Samsung Galaxy S III1641

LG Optimus 4X HD1568

LG Optimus G1522

Meizu MX 4-core1468

Nexus 41310

If you're wondering why you would need that much processing power in a camera, you should consider that the advanced functionality enabled by the Android OS opens a lot of possibilities if the device has the computing power for them. You can edit 1080p videos right on the device, no need for a computer, and that takes power. It's also capable of complex live effects - if the Galaxy Camera becomes popular, we should start seeing apps on the Play Store that squeeze the Exynos chipset for all it's worth.

And then there's the other thing - you can use the Camera as a thick, weird phablet. It's not as snazzy as a Galaxy Note II, but it can play games and browse the web almost as well.